by Andy Merrett
Links, intelligent tweeting and forthright asking are some of the keys more likely to get your Twitter tweets retreated, according to a new study by scientist Dan Zarella.
He lists nine scientifically proven ways to get retweeted on Twitter.
Links were found to be three times more prevalent in retweets than other tweets, with bit.ly the URL shortener of choice (unsurprisingly).
The ten most popular words in retweets were: [Read more…]
by Andy Merrett
It’s not news that many journalists working in traditional print media are feeling the pinch, but a new survey published in Nature journal suggests that science journalism is really under pressure.
Surveying nearly 500 science journalists from Europe and North America, it found that jobs are being lost because the science sections of newspapers aren’t making money.
Conversely, it found that science blogs and web sites run by researchers are growing in number and readership, and are often looked to by traditional journalists for story ideas.
Of course there are plenty of issues to contend with when it comes to science blogging — authenticity and trustworthiness, for a start, as well as how to monetise, particularly when sponsorship and advertising could come from drug companies, threatening readers’ perception of a site’s impartiality.
Are science blogs a good substitute for the in-depth research and analysis found in the papers?
(Via Xinhua Net)
by Anne Helmond
Grand Text Auto, a group blog about computer narrative, games, poetry and art, has recently launched an interesting blogging experiment that may take blogging and publishing to the next level. Noah Wardrip-Fruin is putting the manuscript of his upcoming book Expressive Processing, about digital fictions and computer games, online so that the Grand Text Auto community may participate in an open, blog-based peer review. The community is invited to give feedback on the work in the form of comments and/or trackbacks which in its turn may be picked up by the author.
It is the beginning of a more social and networked book.
by Andy Merrett
Attendees at the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference have been discussing whether there is a need for a code of conduct amongst science bloggers, which may include elements such as conflicts of interest disclosures, comment moderation, and protection of anonymous colleagues.
The first session of the second annual event was led by Janet Stemwedel. According to Ivan Oransky, who attended and reported on the conference, a lot of the debate focused on the differences between journalists and bloggers. Sound familiar?
I mentioned that, and Stemwedel’s response was telling: “Consider that science journalists are parents, and science bloggers are teenagers. The bloggers don’t really want to be like their parents, but they know journalists have been at this for a while and might have something to offer as they make their way.”
Worryingly, at one level, was the possibility that science bloggers might want to take a look at, and adopt, O’Reilly’s general bloggers code of conduct draft.
Possibly a better idea, though open to abuse, was a “science blogging ethics code wiki”. This idea was met with some enthusiasm.
While a general, blanket code of conduct for bloggers has been widely met with harsh and impassioned opposition, there may be a place for particular niches to develop their own, voluntary, codes or “best practice” guidelines. Not all blogging communities are as large or as outspoken on the technicalities of blogging as the tech and metablogging ones, so what may not work in one area could work very well in another.
(Via TheScientist.com)
by Anne Helmond
Recent adjustments in Google’s PageRank algorithm have caused a stir the blogosphere because of blogs rising or dropping significantly. However, Google seems to be facing problems with the indexing of the blogosphere in general.
